Big Data will shield the Apple Watch from Android onslaught

Protection racket

Hurrah! Protected competitive advantage due to the deployment of that mighty cash pile. And that's the bit that corporations really like about whatever it is that they produce. Sure, competitive advantage is nice. None of us really want to end up in that neo-classical idea of a true free market, where we're just price takers subject to supply and demand. We all want to be able to spread, as producers, a little bit of out special mojo over things so that we can charge more for our goods. And “protected” is even better.

Which brings us back to this Big Data thing, the Jesuswatch and how much of what it does depends upon those server farms. The more that does depend on them, then the more Apple is protected against the no-name copiers, simply because they won't have the capital to match those services. We know very well that Siri largely operates away from the local processor. It wouldn't surprise at all to find that in the new J-Gadget, where a choice could be made about local or distant processing, it would be made to go distant. It would be worth it simply to leverage the competitive advantage that Apple has from that cash pile.

This is, you understand, very much playing with possibilities rather than attempting to divine exact motives. But big companies do like to make sure that they're not going to get eaten by the small fry. As much as is possible, they'd like those remora to be complements to their shark, not substitutes for it.

So I can well imagine that the plan is for the Watch to be an input-output device reliant upon having access to large banks of those expensive servers. Simply so that it builds a barrier between Apple, which has the cash to do that, and the smaller companies, which don't.

If the Apple Watch is a cute bit of kit that sits on the wrist and does things, then Apple's going to face a lot of competition from smaller players. If, however, it's really a way to deliver services from those vast and expensive data farms, then the Big Data stuff and the capital required to build and operate it becomes both a competitive advantage for Apple and also, to some extent, a protected one. ®